Major Group: Women
High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development
30 June – 9 July 2014
Trusteeship Council Chamber (CB), United Nations
Session: Island Voices Global Choices: promoting genuine and durable partnerships
Tuesday July 1, 2014 from 3pm to 5:30pm
Trusteeship Council Chamber, UNHQ, New York, USA
Noelene Nabulivou, Lead discussant *
Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN)
Diverse Voices and Action for Equality, Fiji
Women’s Major Group on Sustainable Development
Greetings: Distinguished Co-chairs, panelists, delegates, friends. Thanks for the opportunity to briefly reflect on the theme and key questions. I have consolidated all these elements, as briefly follows:
• First, affirming that the concerns of states with special circumstances such as SID, LDCs, landlocked states and Africa, must be strongly and explicitly included in the HLPF Ministerial declaration, including through specific reference to the 3rd Global SIDS Conference outcome document;
• Secondly, ensuring inclusion in the SIDS outcome document of the full range of normative international human rights frameworks with specific reference to gender equality, and universal access to SRHR with no qualifications. Positive SIDS advancements must also be held against wider political anti-women and anti-human rights regressive stances by some non-SIDS states and UN Observers.
• During a recent high level meeting on gender, climate change and sustainable development in Nadi, Fiji, state and non-state participants discussed relevant, durable and just partnerships, and the need for:
• Broader and nuanced notions of ‘public-private partnerships’ to better articulate possibilities for civil society and social movements to work with governments, especially at local, national and sub-regional levels;
• More consistent, transparent and resourced channels for formal engagement by major groups, civil society and social movements in SIDs development processes. This is critical to discuss at this early stage of High Level Political Forum development, else the rhetoric on partnerships will remain just that. There is also a need to create and sustain cross-linkages between multilateral negotiations, so that the HLPF adequately reflects national, regional and global realities;
• SIDS states, as for all countries, must create and sustain enabling conditions for social inclusion and justice, human security, sustainable peace, environmental sustainability, and gender equality and women’s human rights. People cannot access their full range of social, economic and environmental rights, where conditions of democratisation, justice and equality are shaky or arbitrary, and where all members of the society are not equally regarded, and protected.
• Moreover, as raised by the Righting Finance Initiative and others, there can also be no justice and sustainable development for people of SIDS without tackling global asymmetries on trade, debt, finance, ODA, and taxation, including capacity to generate useful data. No use to tackle issues of fisheries and marine conservation, forestry, energy, food security, water and climate change, when leaving unchanged the underlying structures, and without adequate policy space for implementation. Instead, governments must craft an HLPF that can lead and inform international efforts to transform unequal power relations between different multilateral organizations of global governance, between transnational corporations and States, and between more and less developed States, including SIDS, LDCs and other countries with special circumstances. This is a huge task, but essential.
• I close with an observation clearly articulated in the draft outcome document of the 3rd Global SIDS Conference. Human induced climate change is already changing our world and development prospects in irreversible and complex ways; loss and damage is already happening; adaptation measures proposed and implemented are nowhere near enough, and if there is a scenario of ‘development as usual’, future global impact will be of increasingly horrendous scale for billions of people around the world, including SIDs. This is not a ‘doom and gloom’ scenario, it is already the reality for too many around the world, with more to come.
• This is why the draft SIDS 3rd World Conference Outcome document makes a clear call for better adaptation and loss and damage measures, and strongest possible mitigation targets at the Paris Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, in late 2015.
• This is clearly not JUST the work of the UNFCCC - hence this session and ones upcoming on ‘HLPF agenda-setting’. One of the key roles of the HLPF is to work out how to assist States to radically change development priorities and commitments, to enable ambitious mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020, and toward aggregate emission pathways that will have a chance of holding the increase in global average temperature below 2° C, or 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels.
• Without this, the HLPF will simply not work, because sustainable development is not possible in a climate-distorted world. The timeline is urgent, and the scale of change required is unprecedented. The 3rd World Conference on SIDS will need to show the way in an ambitious outcome document, fully reflected through into HLPF Outcome documents and future work, and other key human rights and development agreements.
This is the time for clear leadership and common vision on how to include those left behind, with gender equality and women’s human rights and an ecosphere approach, as core to sustainable development.
I thank you for your time.
Contact: noelenen@gmail.com
30 June – 9 July 2014
Trusteeship Council Chamber (CB), United Nations
Session: Island Voices Global Choices: promoting genuine and durable partnerships
Tuesday July 1, 2014 from 3pm to 5:30pm
Trusteeship Council Chamber, UNHQ, New York, USA
Noelene Nabulivou, Lead discussant *
Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN)
Diverse Voices and Action for Equality, Fiji
Women’s Major Group on Sustainable Development
Greetings: Distinguished Co-chairs, panelists, delegates, friends. Thanks for the opportunity to briefly reflect on the theme and key questions. I have consolidated all these elements, as briefly follows:
• First, affirming that the concerns of states with special circumstances such as SID, LDCs, landlocked states and Africa, must be strongly and explicitly included in the HLPF Ministerial declaration, including through specific reference to the 3rd Global SIDS Conference outcome document;
• Secondly, ensuring inclusion in the SIDS outcome document of the full range of normative international human rights frameworks with specific reference to gender equality, and universal access to SRHR with no qualifications. Positive SIDS advancements must also be held against wider political anti-women and anti-human rights regressive stances by some non-SIDS states and UN Observers.
• During a recent high level meeting on gender, climate change and sustainable development in Nadi, Fiji, state and non-state participants discussed relevant, durable and just partnerships, and the need for:
• Broader and nuanced notions of ‘public-private partnerships’ to better articulate possibilities for civil society and social movements to work with governments, especially at local, national and sub-regional levels;
• More consistent, transparent and resourced channels for formal engagement by major groups, civil society and social movements in SIDs development processes. This is critical to discuss at this early stage of High Level Political Forum development, else the rhetoric on partnerships will remain just that. There is also a need to create and sustain cross-linkages between multilateral negotiations, so that the HLPF adequately reflects national, regional and global realities;
• SIDS states, as for all countries, must create and sustain enabling conditions for social inclusion and justice, human security, sustainable peace, environmental sustainability, and gender equality and women’s human rights. People cannot access their full range of social, economic and environmental rights, where conditions of democratisation, justice and equality are shaky or arbitrary, and where all members of the society are not equally regarded, and protected.
• Moreover, as raised by the Righting Finance Initiative and others, there can also be no justice and sustainable development for people of SIDS without tackling global asymmetries on trade, debt, finance, ODA, and taxation, including capacity to generate useful data. No use to tackle issues of fisheries and marine conservation, forestry, energy, food security, water and climate change, when leaving unchanged the underlying structures, and without adequate policy space for implementation. Instead, governments must craft an HLPF that can lead and inform international efforts to transform unequal power relations between different multilateral organizations of global governance, between transnational corporations and States, and between more and less developed States, including SIDS, LDCs and other countries with special circumstances. This is a huge task, but essential.
• I close with an observation clearly articulated in the draft outcome document of the 3rd Global SIDS Conference. Human induced climate change is already changing our world and development prospects in irreversible and complex ways; loss and damage is already happening; adaptation measures proposed and implemented are nowhere near enough, and if there is a scenario of ‘development as usual’, future global impact will be of increasingly horrendous scale for billions of people around the world, including SIDs. This is not a ‘doom and gloom’ scenario, it is already the reality for too many around the world, with more to come.
• This is why the draft SIDS 3rd World Conference Outcome document makes a clear call for better adaptation and loss and damage measures, and strongest possible mitigation targets at the Paris Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, in late 2015.
• This is clearly not JUST the work of the UNFCCC - hence this session and ones upcoming on ‘HLPF agenda-setting’. One of the key roles of the HLPF is to work out how to assist States to radically change development priorities and commitments, to enable ambitious mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020, and toward aggregate emission pathways that will have a chance of holding the increase in global average temperature below 2° C, or 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels.
• Without this, the HLPF will simply not work, because sustainable development is not possible in a climate-distorted world. The timeline is urgent, and the scale of change required is unprecedented. The 3rd World Conference on SIDS will need to show the way in an ambitious outcome document, fully reflected through into HLPF Outcome documents and future work, and other key human rights and development agreements.
This is the time for clear leadership and common vision on how to include those left behind, with gender equality and women’s human rights and an ecosphere approach, as core to sustainable development.
I thank you for your time.
Contact: noelenen@gmail.com